The Wonderful Wines That Weren’t

Originally posted in My Cellar Notes in 2003.

I began making wine in the early 1980s, and, fortunately, I have kept pretty decent records of my wines all along. I sat admiring my stack of “cellar notes” recently, thinking how much foresight I had shown keeping these meticulous records. Surely my recent successes in wine competitions and more informal tastings were due, in large part, to the lessons I had learned over the years by capitalizing on early successful efforts.

Talk about selective memory! Or fading memory! Or, maybe, no memory at all!!  I sat down with a delicious (if I say so myself) glass of a 2000 Bordeaux-style red blend, and began reading through the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of batch notes faithfully rendered over the years. And the floodgates opened. I began to be overwhelmed with the deeply repressed recollections of some seriously bad beverages I had concocted in the past. Undoubtedly these were traumatic events best left buried in the trash pile of personal history. I won’t bore you with all the details, but here are some bare-bones sketches.

First there was the Mycoderma-From-Hell! Well, it was supposed to be Seyval blanc, but nobody ever told me that air was the deadly enemy of wine. That wine was simply a milepost on the journey between grape juice and vinegar! I can remember now calling my winemaking mentor way too late one night, barely able to choke out the question about why there was nearly a quarter-inch thick layer of gauzy-looking spider webs all over the surface of my three-quarters-full carboy. I had already pulled the stopper and taken a sniff. I already suspected that my prize white wine would most likely be “bottled” in the salad dressing cruet, if at all.

That furry wine was nowhere near as disturbing as the Chamboursin I made one year that turned “ropey”—that’s the term my mentor used. The contents of the carboy looked more like petroleum than wine. Or like liquefied snake skin—alternately oily dark and shiny silver slime, depending on the light. He tried to assure me that it was probably a “treatable disease,” but I knew just looking at it that I could never drink it, nor could I ask friends and family to do so. I used it to soak the compost heap.

And, oh yes, there was the “mouse fur” Cabernet Sauvignon. I properly noted—and now I too clearly remember—it was “cloudy, stinky, and vile.”

These stand out among any number of wines for which there are just those tell-tale short descriptors near the end of my log entries. “I let this stay on lees too long. Cheesy” “This may be salvageable as sherry.” “I never should have blended this with the chardonnay. Now they’re both funky” I especially like one note in which I had begun to sound like an aspiring sommelier: “I detect an abundance of ascessence in this wine.” That means “vinegar!”

Not all screw-ups are total losses. That is, sometimes a sow’s ear can make a silk purse. There was one 10-gallon batch of metheglin mead I fermented back in 1983. It was made with some old dark honey, and I thought I had used a rather heavy hand with the spice additions. For the first few years it was simply abominable. A few years later it had begun to taste like cough medicine or horehound candy. Ever the optimist, I left it in the carboys, stored away in the dark. Eventually the flavor started taking on slightly sweet and nutty tones. I then deliberately put it into half-full carboys, fortified it with grain alcohol, and let it sit a few more years to oxidize further. Last year I drank the last of that “sherry mead,” now 20 years old, and all who tasted it thought it was just fantastic!

What’s the lesson learned? Keep good notes to help improve your wine making, and read them every now and again for a reality check when a new batch of medals or ribbons appears in the mail. Finally, if you’re not sure, keep it for twenty years. You might be surprised.